::06:26:08::

::: To the Gone World :::

Only 2 Coney Island polar bears left
Peter Frampton and Nathaniel West.
They cannot help
The drunk and lost Indians
In The Valley of Fire
Or the Asians
Or the Mexicans
Or the Cornhuskers
Speak Hebrew.

Things I never expected to say include: “Don’t pick on the hipsters.”
“The end may be a few days away.”
“The beginning may happen at the same time.”
As the hipsters
The homecoming of Odysseus
And the end
Are connected to the eclipse,
At the hips
To Cerberus
And sped through the system in a haze
It feels like doom is closing in
But I am happy to be here
Wind whistling through the hollow tower
Poles with poles catching nothing
The Cyclone standing tall and silent
In the west
The sky is a menacing grey blurring into darkness
From the Rolling Stone Hipsters at Vasmay Lounge
To riding parallel dimensions of Denis Johnson

There are also
Things I can no longer watch on T.V.
“WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK and anything doing with The Secret History of the Bra.”

To the edge of the world
To Neptune and its satellite,
I am a dying wonderland by the sea
With every step like being in a painting
The sign says: “Bump your butt off here,”
But there is no longer a way in.
Only the plastic shovels
Indicate the life and cheer
Of these last days of summer
Fat seagulls living on broken glass and cigarette butts,
Empty trash bins
Living on the surreal, the Wonder Wheel and the desolate
Parking lots and past seasons never to return

Inside Nathan’s
You would never know the living dead
What would Henry Miller
Or Lawrence Ferlinghetti have to say now?
Knowing what we do?
Poems and pictures of the gone world
A still life title
A dormant Ferris Wheel
In the late winter,
Parachute jump sky

“In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see people of the world exactly at the moment when they first attained the title of suffering humanity.”

There is a lone man in black
Sitting on a jetty
Thinking of what?
Life, love, loss, past, future, maybe the Q train is the way to go?
Butchering Bukowski tongue
Making a stew of it
Oh where is your beef tongue now?
BEEF TONGUE?

It is a cup of your past
Drink from it
With your scent on my scarf,
Strands of your hair
In my borrowed books,
Here is to all the break dancers
The wood paneled train cars
And coin fare tokens,
The living statues in the subways
And vaudeville performers
Out of place
And time warped
In the American century gone quiet

Written by: ~ J.D. Szalla

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